Four Variations on a Theme of Childhood
by Kanthia
Summary: Strange circumstances brought inhuman children into the world - and nobody was left the same for it.


**01**  
_It's the little things_, Bulma thinks, as she watches Vegeta train.

The similarities in surface anatomy between Saiyan and human were so prominent they were astonishing; but for the most obvious difference, which neither Vegeta nor Goku had any longer, one could easily mistake them for men of Earth. No, in Vegeta it's the little things – the smooth but rigid texture of his hair (Saiyan hair was, actually, thin strands of darker skin cells), the muscles where muscles were not supposed to be, the way he could bend his fingers backwards if he wanted to – that reminded you that he was not a thing of Earth at all.

He knows little of Earth's customs, and she knows little of his; each of them had made assumptions about the way the world worked for the other. When he took her for the first time, violently, during a full moon (Saiyans had always mated as Oozaru), he had dislocated both of her shoulders and fractured her collarbone, broke her pelvis, left burns on her neck and torso, from the heat of his blood. He did not know any other way. He is Eros and Thanatos, knowing nothing but to love and destroy with every inch of his power.

_It's the little things_, she repeats to herself, the baby burning in her womb, and the scars are still there.

**02**  
She looks at him coolly, and he almost immediately regrets asking the question - but he loves her, and he needs to know.

She tells him that she's not an android, and that was a misnomer. She is a cyborg, but she does not remember her birth name – Dr. Gero had tampered with her and her brother's brains, and as such she does not trust any memories she has from before her activation. _18 is fine_, she says. _It's as much of a name as I'll ever have._ And she laughs, bitterly; she is a woman with no home, or family, or direction, or purpose for living, and he comforts her in her loneliness.

Later, he swallows his pride and gathers up his courage, and asks her a question of a somewhat different nature. To that, she purses her lips and there is a faraway look in her eyes, and she tells him that Gero was enough of a gentleman to leave that intact, although her brother was not so lucky. And then she grins that world-destroying grin, and says that if Bulma can survive with a half-Saiyan in her womb, there is no reason why the two of them couldn't try.

It was odd, sharing a bed with a living being that was not living – he could feel no energy radiating off her, as if she existed without existing, a cold, empty spot whose thoughts had turned to love. It was as though he had, he supposed, fallen in love with a black hole.

Her skin had been reinforced to the point that she could not safely carry the baby to term. Bulma delivered the baby at four weeks, excused herself to compose herself when she discovered where the cords and circuits ran among muscles and veins, and 18 bled a cold white-blue slightly radioactive fluid. They spent the next eight months watching and hoping, as their daughter grew in a tube.

18 refused to watch when Marron was born. It reminded herself too much of herself.

**03**  
She loves Gohan dearly, and she has learned his moods; she knows when to talk to him, and when to leave him alone. On a warm summer evening she visits the Son house and has coffee with his mother, and she asks her why Gohan is the way he is.

Gohan suffered, she is told, quite dearly as a child. His father was taken away when he was four years old, and he was kidnapped by an enemy of his father's, with whom he lived in the woods for a full year, far from home. He returned home sunburnt and badly wounded. And then, after being beaten close to death, he was taken to a very, very distant place, where he found and lost his father again.

_There's a part of him that you'll never comprehend,_ Gohan's mother says, quietly. _There are things he's been through that none of us will ever understand._ He was almost seven when he returned home, and he was eight when his father came home. _I try to protect him, but there's something in his blood that makes it impossible to keep him safe._ They had set a whole chain of events into motion, which ended with his father's death in the Cell Games, when he was only eleven – twelve – something like that; Gohan's mother admits she always misses Gohan's age by a year. _It tells him to fight, even when he doesn't want to._ Gohan has never forgiven himself for his father's death. He came home with a pain in his eyes so large it crept into every movement he made, every sentence he forced out.

Videl does not understand, much – and thinks of her father, whispering of smoke, mirrors, and a cult of martial artists. But she thinks she understands Gohan a little better, thinks of his rushed lies to hide a dead father, and it hurts.

**04**  
Namekians lay eggs, but nobody has taught the Nameless Namekian, mostly the son of the son of Katas, stranger on a planet not his own, how to do so.

"I don't know if I'm supposed to care," he says to no-one in particular, looking down at the earth from the Lookout, a world that is both his and not his. "I'm sure Saiyans weren't supposed to care about their children, but Goku was – different. And Vegeta changed, in time. Is it from living on Earth? Is this from Kami, or Nail? Or is it…"

There was a time, of course, that the child of King Piccolo had taken on a protégé of his own. And in that long and uncomfortable year, hadn't there been times when he had found a strange sort of peace? Looking after a boy who was strong enough of body, but too weak of mind to care for himself, hadn't that changed him, elementally? Hadn't that rearranged every cell in his body, every part of his mind?

**03**  
"Something broke," Gohan says. "Android Sixteen looked at me, and told me that it is not a sin to fight for the things I believed in, and it – _he_ – smiled. And Cell stepped forward –"

He's sweating. "—I felt it slip." He clenches his fists. Videl wants to comfort him, but she hasn't the faintest idea how. "Every wall within me, every – damn – it _hurt_, and I felt this – this hunger. I felt this want, this need, to kill. To hurt. My father told me, once, to use the pain of loss. I lost my father…"

He swallows. "…Sometimes," Gohan says, "I feel it – this Saiyan blood in me." He twists his lips. "It burns me, from the inside. I can feel your aura. I can smell your fear. It smells…thick." He pauses, his whole body stilling, feral. She is vaguely aware that he was never fully human. She wonders if Saiyans were cannibals. "It's getting thicker." His eyes darken, hungry. Her hair stands on edge and she can sense something very large and very monstrous within him, and she is afraid.

**02**  
When Marron is six she is driven to her to school in the city, and at school she is told (among other things) that mommies get pregnant before they have babies. Indignantly, she points out that it's not _mommies_ that get pregnant, it's _machines_. When her teacher asks her what she means, she says that her mommy and daddy have shown her the machine where she was born, in West City.

She earns sniggers from her classmates and a note home, which mommy reads and then gets that cold, hard look on her face. In the morning mommy comes with her to school and has a talk with the teacher in the hallway, and when class starts that day the teacher nervously says that some people have to be in machines before they're born, because they or their mommy are too sick to be safe.

That night she asks her daddy if her mommy was too sick to be safe when she was pregnant. Her daddy looks at her long and hard and serious, then ruffles her hair and tells her how happy he is that he has a daughter, and that his daughter has a mommy, and how proud they are of her.

**01**  
"My son," Vegeta says, broken and bloody, and the sound is less a plea and more an affirmation, acceptance, a prayer: _I brought myself back for you. I dragged myself screaming and blood-blind out of Hell for you. For you. My son._

Years later, in his darkest hours, Trunks would reflect back on that moment with sadness, and great joy.


End file.
